The existence of the great slaughter-house of Paris dates back to the most remote period of monarchy.  The parish church of the corporation of butchers, namely, that of St. Pierre aux Boeufs in the city, on the front of which were two sculptured oxen, existed before the tenth century.  A Celtic monument was discovered on the site of the ancient part of Paris, with a bas-relief representing a wild bull carrying three cranes standing among oak branches.  Archaeology has chosen to recognise in this sculpture a Druidical allegory, which has descended to us in the shape of the triumphal car of the Prize Ox (Fig. 88).  The butchers who, for centuries at least in France, only killed sheep and pigs, proved themselves most jealous of their privileges, and admitted no strangers into their corporation.  The proprietorship of stalls at the markets, and the right of being admitted as a master butcher at the age of seven years and a day, belonged exclusively to the male descendants of a few rich and powerful families.  The Kings of France alone, on their accession, could create a new master butcher.  Since the middle of the fourteenth century the “Grande Boucherie” was the seat of an important jurisdiction, composed of a mayor, a master, a proctor, and an attorney; it also had a judicial council before which the butchers could bring up all their cases, and an appeal from which could only be considered by Parliament.  Besides this court, which had to decide cases of misbehaviour on the part of the apprentices, and all their appeals against their masters, the corporation had a counsel in Parliament, as also one at the Chatelet, who were specially attached to the interests of the butchers, and were in their pay.

[Illustration:  Fig. 88.—­The Holy Ox.—­Celtic Monument found in Paris under the Choir of Notre-Dame in 1711, and preserved in the Musee de Cluny et des Thermes.]

Although bound, at all events with their money, to follow the calling of their fathers, we find many descendants of ancient butchers’ families of Paris, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, abandoning their stalls to fill high places in the state, and even at court.  It must not be concluded that the rich butchers in those days occupied themselves with the minor details of their trade; the greater number employed servants who cut up and retailed the meat, and they themselves simply kept the accounts, and were engaged in dealing through factors or foremen for the purchase of beasts for their stalls (Fig. 89).  One can form an opinion of the wealth of some of these tradesmen by reading the enumeration made by an old chronicler of the property and income of Guillaume de Saint-Yon, one of the principal master butchers in 1370.  “He was proprietor of three stalls, in which meat was weekly sold to the amount of 200 livres parisis (the livre being equivalent to 24 francs at least), with an average profit of ten to fifteen per cent.; he had an income of 600 livres parisis; he possessed besides